Post 6: Reflection on how the media present self image issues and strategies

The media seems to present self image both physically and intangibly the online self to be rather subjective. The utilisation of media by commercialized corporations presents self image to be more superficial, cliché and emphasize on the use of their products based on profiting goals. The media present the corporations making use of the agenda setting theory, by presenting advertisements with underlying subtext such as to be beautiful, people have to use a certain product to enhance their self image.

Government on the other hand seems to stand on promoting healthy self awareness through the cultivation theory. Using media, the government teach common values of self love and appreciation to cultivate the masses to maintain a healthy self image and confidence.

The media portray the audience as two debating sides. Some audience are vulnerable to the influence of how the commercial corporations use the media to present self image. They do not fight back but support the self image perceptions given to them through the social learning modelling theory.  They pattern and model after icons presented by media. They desire to look physically like them and do what is the “in” thing to promote their self image.

Another portion of the audience portrayed by media is showed to be more repulsive of the negative influence on the physical and online self image. Hence they culture jam on the internet and even on streets to voice out against the corporations and also to the masses.

The main cause of why some audience are subjected to the influence of self image portrayed on media by the commercial corporations is because of cultural imperialism and cultural colonialism. This is possible because the global media and cultural flows have been imbalanced where cultural flows are not emphasized by media enough. Furthermore, with the free flow of information accompanied by the rise of internet and advertisement influence, it’s inevitable for cultural imperialism especially western dominance to take over. Thus, audience subconsciously accept what is given to them through the media as though it’s their culture.

The main cause of why certain audience can “fight back” against the influence of media by corporations regarding self image is because of the functions of new media. New media today allows higher convergence, interconnectivity, interactivity, mobility, portability, digitalization and audience control on information flow.  With greater interactivity and interconnectivity, making use of the multidirectional model of new media, audience can post information from their phone directly to the internet and share with other audience their views. Furthermore, with audience control ability through new media now, audience can create media text to reach the masses which explain why culture jamming on self image advertisements by corporations is possible almost immediately.

   

The consequences of the repetitive negative influence of self image presented by corporations through media can affect the imbalance of self image in the long term, cause loss of self identity and even alienation and low esteem. These eventually lead to the vulnerability to leavisim where there is a loss of traditional culture on how the physical self image should be like and how online self is discouraged in the past.

To counter the media’s negative influence on self image, the individual and the government have to do their part. Based on the selective influence theory, audience should practice selective attention and exposure by not giving attention to ideas by media which degrades and superficialize self image. They should practice healthy selective perception and selective retention by paying attention to the subtext and the attribution of the meaning of certain information to avoid retaining the negative influences on self image

The government should practice appropriate censorship and rating on advertisements to restrict  negative influences from the media to the audience. The government should also make sure what the media portrays about the self image does not allow normalization and racialisation to take place. This can happen when self image is portrayed and generalised ideally to certain culture and races which can cause discrimination (dark = ugly, white = beautiful).

  

All in all, everything still ties down to media.  To ensure healthy self image, all players have to play a part especially the audience as they have the right to “protect themselves” from negative influences of self image presented by media. As the saying goes “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil”, audience have the right to control their information flow and how they perceive information to build a healthy self image both physically and online.

No. of words: 749

Resources
pictures from yahoo :

http://sg.images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=A0S0uPAE_5NPf1wAoqgl4gt.?p=self+image+&fr=&ei=utf-8&n=30&x=wrt&tab=organic&y=Search